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Thursday, September 15, 2016

Arthur
Miller A View from the Bridge / Los
Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the performance I saw was opening night, September
14, 2016

I have to admit
that Arthur Miller’s A View from the
Bridge, with its hyperventilated incestuous urges, its homosexual slurs,
and even a hint of homoerotic desire, all circling round the well-meaning but
not so bright longshoreman Eddie, has never been one of my favorite plays.

At least in the production I saw last
night at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre, famed Dutch director Ivo Van Hove
tossed out the family’s dowdy little apartment stuffed with fussy and
falling-apart furniture. The original, in which five people are pushed into a
single flat makes for a kind of claustrophobia which, a moments, if it
generates some body heat, also takes all the air out the drama.

Van Hove, perceiving the play as a kind of
Greek drama, has created instead a open rectangular space which serves as
living room, bed room, lawyers’ offices and any other space that might be
necessary. By creating two side panels of audience seats on the stage itself,
the director has further created the sensation of a Greek amphitheater, while
simultaneously diminishing the vast space of the stage and allowing for more
theater seats. A single central opening, backed in black further creates a
sense of dramatic entry as the characters come and go. As in the original, Van
Hove uses the family lawyer as the chorus (the metaphorical “bridge” of the
play’s title), commenting on and helping to explain the inner feelings of a man
who cannot himself express them.

All of this opens up the play, allowing,
as the director as argued, the playwright’s words to speak out their poetry.
But, alas, Miller’s language has always been rather pedestrian, most of his
figures being everyday blokes; and even though it’s given special privilege
here, the character’s utterances feel as dowdy and diminished, at times, as the
overstuffed furniture that one encounters in most productions of this play.

What exacerbates this feeling is that the
play has been cast with very young talents. And while all are appealingly fresh
thespians, few of them have heft of supposedly Sicilian middle-age figures of
whom Miller writes. This is important, in the original, because, except for the
two youngest of this household, all others feel worn out and used (just like
their now missing furniture), with few choices left. Marco (Alex Esola) may
intend, after a few years of working in the US, to return back to Italy and his
wife, but we know he will have lost their best years together and will never
recover that hole in his life.

Eddie (Frederick Weller) is so attracted
to his growing-up niece because, like a daughter, she has lit up his otherwise
drab working-man’s life. His feelings for her, moreover, have a great deal to
do with middle-age angst. Like many a hard worker who suddenly discover
themselves in their late 40s, he is terrified of what’s ahead. If the new
interloper, Rudolpho (Dave Register) does succeed in carrying her off, Eddie will
have little joy left.

Like so many wives of men like Eddie,
Beatrice (Andrus Nichols), although loving, feel as if they have been cast off,
and in emotional response, find it harder and harder to demonstrate that love.

This younger cast simply does not have
the heft and weight to give these feelings their due. Indeed, the handsome and
lean Weller, throughout much of the play, seemed simply too slight and frail to
convey the range of emotions raging through his character; at moments we simply
couldn’t hear him. At first I feared that my somewhat elderly ears were playing
tricks; but as rose to leave at the end of the play, the gentlemen on my left
spoke to each other of having the same problem in simply hearing him. It was
not that Weller was not a good actor, he simply didn’t yet possess the
“gravitas” of the character.

As Catherine, moreover, Catherine Combs
seemed more like a mini-skirted pre-teen than an eighteen-year-old high school
graduate set on becoming a stenographer and secretary. I am sure Van Hove made
this a conscious decision in order to establish the girlish attitude that
innocently crossed sexual lines in her relationship with her uncle. But when
the handsome and charming Rodolpho comes into her life, it is a bit difficult
to even comprehend his attraction to a being who seems to be still a child. The
tall and somewhat lanky Register, moreover, seemed at odds with the diminutive
Combs.

But, finally, it is simply the oppressive
obviousness of Miller’s script that dooms his dark drama. We know, almost from
the beginning, where this drama is going to take us: in tragedy for male lead,
Eddie, and disaster for the two illegal immigrants. The same scenario is being
played out in our daily newspapers even today.

The only surprise in Miller’s rendering of
this tale is Eddie’s confusion over his own sexuality. It is almost as if,
since he cannot sexually “have” Catherine, he will convert the handsome Rodolfo
into someone whom he might love. In his confused macho thinking the very fact
that the young Italian man sings, is easy-going, can quick-design a dress, and
dance means that he must be “odd,” code word for gay. In his mind, he may
justify his long kiss on the lips with Rodolfo as “outing” the man before
Catherine in order to save her; but we know that there’s definitely something
else going on there. And it is the only time when Eddie transforms his
ever-present anger into some sort of passion; and, accordingly, Miller’s sudden
revelation still startles even today.

Of course, after such an unthinkable act,
he must destroy everyone around him, particularly himself, using his own kind
of macho—very much present in the Italian Marco—as a tool of his death. The
only hope Miller leaves his audience is that Rodolfo and Catherine may be
spared and will go on to create a more fluid familial life. But since Rodolfo,
as Marco’s brother, may be implicated in the murder, we cannot even be sure of
that.

Since
Elia Kazan’s 1956 film Baby Doll
was based on Tennessee Williams’ early short play, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and Williams, himself, later rewrote the
play as Tiger Tail, it is difficult
to know why Pierrre Laville and Emily Mann determined to “re-adapt” the version
of the play, named after the movie, I saw the other day at Los Angeles’
Fountain Theatre. Perhaps one

has to read all the variations,
including Kazan’s original script—which he claimed he wrote without Williams’
help—before comprehending the need for yet another rewrite. Certainly, this
production, with a few important exceptions, is pretty loyal to Kazan’s motion
picture, and in that fact leads anyone who’s seen the wonderful movie to make
comparisons.

It is perhaps patently unfair to compare
the acting abilities of the film foursome—Karl Malden, Carol Baker, Eli
Wallach, and Mildred Dunncok—with the younger and far less experienced cast of
John Prosky, Lindsay LaVanchy, Daniel Bess, and Karen Kondazian. Although Baker
was the least talented of the film cast, she was perfect for the pouting
child-bride of the Southern plantation bigot, Archie Lee Meighan. Wallach
almost literally steamed-up the screen in his first film appearance back in
1956, and the always solid Malden played his character with near perfection,
with Dunnock providing the daffy eccentricity of Aunt Rose Comfort.

The Fountain Theatre actors try valiantly
to recreate these roles, and, at moments, they almost succeed, particularly Prosky—whose
actor father I had seen several times on Washington, D. C. Arena stage—who
almost captures the sweaty leftover of a once significant land-owner devoted to
ginning the cotton of his neighbors. His final violent outrage against the new
world in which his good-old-boy tactics are no longer rewarded, is particularly
well-performed and almost terrifyingly touching, particularly when he suddenly
realizes that his former “associates” are now intending to arrest and try him
for his “irrational” behavior.

Bess (as Silva Vaccaro) does his handsome
best to carry out the “tit-for-tat” values hinted at by Archie, as he attempts
to seduce Archie’s teenage bride, who, by marriage agreement, is finally to
have sex with her husband, after two years of chastity, in two days. But, despite
his truly sexy torso and hips, as well as the script’s playful S and M
complications wherein he gently and sometimes not-so-gently toys with her while
holding a small whip, his acting simply doesn’t add up to the dark and far more
horrifying games of hide-and-seek played by the film’s characters as they run
through the decaying mansion’s empty rooms (Archie has just seen the furniture
company repossess nearly every object in them for lack of payment). At moments
Bess seems as sexually naïve and even disinterested as his inexperienced
target; and we have to wonder, at times, whether or not he’s really more
interested in her signature admitting Archie’s guilt in burning down his
character’s competing gin-mill or in capturing her girlish body.

Of course, that’s a question the Kazan
production itself asks. But here, Lavanchy’s Baby Doll seems far less ready and
raunchy than Baker ever did. We know Baker, although playing hard to get, was
perfectly ready to undergo the sexual act with her would-be rapist; but
Lavanchy, seemingly a bit older than Baker’s version, seems far more confused
and confusing, particularly since Lavanchy, alas, seems in the early scenes to
be of the “holler” school of acting. I may be losing my hearing a bit, but the
high loud pitch of her anger over Archie’s clumsy attempts at love-making came
through as too much of a screech, making it far too obvious, that she no longer
is the teenage “baby” she pretends to be. And after those early scenes it
becomes difficult for Lavanchy to return to the innocent child in her scenes
with Bess.

Kondazian certainly revealed Aunt Rose
Comfort as an eccentric human being, but she seemed so crazed at moments that
it was simply hard to believe her. Was her passion for chocolates, stolen from
dying folks at the near-by state hospital, in the film? I certainly don’t
recall it.

I do recall the remarkable collard-greens
scene, in which the Sicilian immigrant Varcarro and Baby Doll praise the
delights of the “pot licker” of Aunt Rose’s uncooked greens simply in order to
taunt the angry Archie. As I remember it they both simply slopped up their
faces with the awful stuff while turning the act of eating, as in the famous
scene in Tom Jones, into a surrogate
of sex. On this stage the entire scene appeared more as a pallid attempt to simply
to get the older man’s goat.

Of course, we can’t get the close-ups of
a camera, and we haven’t the space to see the couple run through the entire
estate, locking themselves away in rooms just in order to dare the other to
enter. These actors have only a front porch with a swing and fresh-water well,
a small dining room and a tiny bedroom to play out their epic dance. And at
moments at the well, on that swing, and in the tiny crib of a bed, this dramatic
version really does reveal a kind of steamy and tender love.

We never know, in either the film or the
stage production, whether or not Vaccaro will return the next day to collect
his prize of the young girl and her aunt. Like so many of Williams’ heroines,
they are left in the lurch. But after seeing this version I had far more doubts
that he might even want to come back.